


Only Losers Go To School

by blackmountainbones, KaijuusAndKryptids



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Community (sitcom), Chris is a psychology professor, Crack Treated Seriously, Crushes, Existentialism, F/F, Friends to Lovers, M/M, OtaYuri Reverse Bang 2017, Satire, Seung-gil is a French professor, a sitcom in fic form really, brief mentions of kink and kink-shaming, ennui, ensemble fic, i guess never, it's a pastiche between Yuri!!! On Ice and Community ok?, it's less of a rom-com and more of a sitcom with a romantic storyline, nothing explicit though, references to Waiting For Godot, the gang's all here, when will i stop mashing up gay ice skating with american sitcoms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2017-05-28
Packaged: 2018-11-01 04:05:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10913979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackmountainbones/pseuds/blackmountainbones, https://archiveofourown.org/users/KaijuusAndKryptids/pseuds/KaijuusAndKryptids
Summary: When Otabek Altin's employer discovers his diploma is fake, he loses his job as a pharmacist and enrolls in Detroit Community College. Forced to take an advanced-level French literature class taught by the deranged Monsieur Lee, Otabek starts a study group in order to impress his crush and makes the friends he never knew he wanted in the process.Yuri Plisetsky is the pint-sized art student with the brilliant wit and bad attitude who immediately captures Otabek's attention. Though Yuri rejects Otabek's advances at their first meeting, together they survive a French professor obsessed withennui, a psychology professor fixated on sex, and study group shenanigans. As the semester progresses, Yuri and Otabek slowly draw closer.  Are theyreallyjust friends, or could they be something more?





	1. Only Losers Go To School

**Author's Note:**

> My entry for the Otayuri Reverse Bang! I was gifted a sweet art prompt by [@communistfireworks](http://communistfireworks.tumblr.com/).... "Idk a College AU? Where they don’t know each other until Yuri gets a tutor in whatever class he’s taking. Yuri’s hardcore studious and competitive trying to get good grades and Otabek swears he doesn’t have a crush on his tutee. Or well, not at first he didn’t. There’s just something about Yuri’s determination to succeed and his pout when he’s working through a problem that pulls a sigh from Otabek....Okay, maybe he has a little crush on Yuri, but he wouldn’t do anything to make Yuri uncomfortable with that! He’s fine simmering with an unattainable crush. (At least he doesn’t know that maybe Yuri has a bit of a crush on him back and tries to impress the much cooler upperclassman but doesn’t know how)"
> 
> My degree is from a community college and I'd just finished a rewatch of the sitcom "Community", and so, 17,000 words later, here we are....

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Only losers go to school  
> I taught myself how to move  
> I'm not the type to count on you  
> 'Cos stupid's next to 'I love you'
> 
> So what can you show me  
> That my heart don't know already  
> We make our sense  
> And you're qualified to me"
> 
> \--"Losers", The Weeknd

“Welcome to Detroit Community College, Mr Altin,” the guidance counselor with the pompadour and dark lipstick said. His new-wave hairstyle, perfectly coiffed, did not budge, despite the rather powerful fan on the file cabinet next to the messy desk. “Thank you for entrusting us with your education.”

Otabek Altin gave the dingy office another once-over. It was cluttered, but more than that, everything was dingy and dilapidated, well past its prime. It did not do much to inspire a potential student’s confidence. However, Otabek knew he did not have many choices. He had just been fired from his job as a pharmacist for lying about his degree and his certifications, and it was either enroll at Detroit Community College or else lose any chance of getting welfare benefits.

“On the bright side, Mr. Altin,” the counselor continued, “you do have some credits transferable from your time at Shukeyev Kazakh Unversitet.”

Otabek cocked an eyebrow belligerently. It was hard to take the counselor seriously when he looked like a long-lost member of the Cure. However, the judgement Otabek was trying to convey with his facial expression was ruined by the embarrassing noise the cheap vinyl couch cushion made when he shifted in his chair.

Nonplussed, the counselor, one Dr. Popovich as indicated by his nameplate, continued. “In fact, you can get your pharmacology certification in a year, and your degree in two, if you are circumspect about the courses you take.”

Otabek fidgeted in his chair, which made another unpleasant noise.

Dr Popovich, the Detroit Community College guidance counselor to which Otabek had been assigned, glared at him with an intense tilt of his pompadour. “I see here, Mr Altin, that you’ll need four semesters of a foreign language to fulfill your gen ed requirement....”

“Can I take Russian?” That should be easy enough. All Otabek’s schooling back in Kazakhstan had been in Russian, after all.

“No, Mr Altin, this is a _community_ college.” The counselor’s enthusiastic emphasis on _community college_ smeared his dark lipstick across his teeth. Otabek chose not to comment.

The counselor made another impatient noise, opening and closing the manila folder that held Otabek’s permanent record. “You can choose either French or Spanish. If you have a problem with our lack of funding for a Russian department, you may notify your Congressman.”

“Um. I’m an immigrant. I can’t vote. My congressman doesn't care about me,” Otabek said.

“Well then, I’m sure you will appreciate the fact that I am an underpaid advisor at a publicly funded academic institution and I have many, many more students to advise before my day is done. And so I ask you, once again, Mr Altin--what will it be, French or Spanish?” The counselor’s eyes bulged as he awaited Otabek’s response.

Otabek sat back in his chair and smirked. This was an easy choice: he’d attended an international high school in Montreal for four years.... “French.”

“Wonderful,” Dr Popovich said, jotting down a note. “The French placement exam is next Thursday.”

Otabek snorted. “I have to take a test before I can take the class? That makes no sense.”

“Mr Altin, if you miss this test, you will _not_ be eligible for a language credit this semester, and it will take you an extra semester to obtain your degree,” Dr. Popovich warned. His black-lacquered nails tapped the coffee-stained surface of his desk impatiently. 

Otabek rolled his eyes. He certainly had no interest in attending Detroit Community College any longer than absolutely necessary. “Fine. This should be easy enough at least,” he muttered under his breath.

 

 

Well, Otabek had been right about one thing: the French exam had been easy. A bit too easy, as it turned out.

“What the fuck is this?” Otabek asked, pointing at his results, which he had placed directly in front of the counselor’s computer screen.

Today Dr Popovich was wearing dramatic eyeliner that made his side-eye even more devastating than usual. “Mazel tov,” he said dryly.

“Why are you congratulating me? This is terrible!”

“Otabek, you’re eligible to take the highest level of French classes this institution offers.” Dr Popovich cleared his throat. His next words were in a more gutteral language, and Otabek was surprised to realize understood what the Dr was saying. “Most of our students are barely literate in English; you’re fluent in at least three languages that I know of.”

“Wait, you knew I speak Russian?” Otabek asked incredulously.

Dr Popovich side eyed him again, and Otabek withered a bit. The man’s eyeliner was enough to wound a man today. “I recognized your accent. And also I read your transcripts.”

Otabek shifted in his chair, which made another unpleasant noise.

“Look, you can take any French class you want, Mr Altin,” the counselor said, effortlessly switching back to unaccented English from his perfect, if polite, Russian.

“Can I take 101?” 

Dr Popovich held his hands palm-up in exasperation. “As long as it’s not below the 300 level,” he amended, then turned to the computer. His desktop wallpaper was the Cure, which struck Otabek as appropriately Gothic. “How do you feel about French Literature of the 20th Century?”

“I don’t even read literature in Kazakh. Or English. Or Russian,” Otabek protested.

“The intellectual challenge will do you good, Mr Altin.” Dr Popovich said patiently. Despite his placid exterior, he seethed at the middle-class fuckboi with the undercut and the expensive shoes who was currently wasting his time. “After all, it says here on your application that you were smart enough to fake being a licensed pharmacist for three years, so you can’t be a complete idiot.” Ignoring Otabek’s seething, glare, Dr Popovich clicked to add the course to Otabek’s schedule. “Who knows? If you bother to apply yourself, you might surprise yourself with what you’re capable of.”

“Yeah right,” Otabek said and shifted in the lumpy chair, and the vinyl cushion made another embarrassing sound.

 

 

“Oh hey, it’s my... pharmacist? Otabek, what are you doing here at Detroit Community College?” Chris asked. He seemed surprised to see Otabek in his office, which was understandable considering that Chris was used to only either seeing him in a lab coat behind the counter at Walgreens or else under the influence of many pharmaceuticals while wearing a mesh shirt at the gay club.

Otabek cleared his throat. “Well, I’m a student. A freshman, actually, in the pharmacology program.”

Chris cocked his head. The fingers of his right hand scratched at the scalp of his bleached-blonde head and his glasses slid down his nose, making him look like some kind of gay authority with whom Otabek was in trouble. “Oh?”

“Well, you see, Walgreens found out that I didn’t exactly.... have a college degree.”

Otabek’s friend pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He hazel eyes narrowed as he regarded Otabek through the lenses. “I thought you had a degree from Columbia.”

“Well, now it’s time to get one from the US,” Otabek quipped.

“That’s not what I thought you meant when you said you had a degree from Colombia,” Chris admitted. He’d been certain Otabek had attended Columbia University, esteemed Ivy league institution and one of the oldest universities in the United States. Not for the first time, Chris had the uneasy feeling that Otabek Altin was not the man he claimed to be.

“You never _asked_ ,” Otabek said, and Chris supposed that it was true. 

Chris drummed his fingers on his desk and sighed. He still had to finish the syllabus for his Psych 101 class. “I’m a professor of psychology, Otabek. To be frank, I’m not certain what you’re doing here, especially considering that you’re majoring in pharmacology, which is a completely unrelated department...”

Otabek reached into the pocket of his leather jacket and removed a creased sheet of paper, which he handed to Chris with a straight face and great ceremony. “Look. I need to get back to my job as soon as possible with as little effort as possible. Considering our prior... professional relationship, you’re obviously willing to help me out....” Otabek tried to smile, but judging from Chris’s shocked gasp, he probably looked more frightening than friendly. “You know. From one professional man to another.”

“You’re asking me to help you cheat.” Chris’s glasses slid down his nose again which made him look like a scolding librarian, especially in his unfortunate tweed jacket.

“Well, _yeah,”_ Otabek scoffed _._ “If I actually wanted to learn something, I wouldn’t have gone to community college.”

“Mr. Altin,” Chris asked, pushing his round glasses up his nose with one perfectly-filed fingernail, “have you ever heard the phrase ‘Cheaters never win, and winners never cheat’?” Chris looked at Otabek expectantly, and Otabek snorted. Ridiculous--cheaters _always_ won, at least until they got caught.

Which was, all things considered, exactly how Otabek had ended up here, a fact which he chose to ignore. “C’mon Chris--”

“That’s Professor Giacometti to you, Mr Altin,” Chris said coldly. “Now, unless you are here as my _student_ with a question related to the psychology class that has not yet begun for the semester, I shall see you next Wednesday.” His hazel gaze flickered pointedly between Otabek and the office door in a not-unclear invitation for Otabek to make himself comfortable by removing himself from the office entirely.

Otabek nodded and picked up his schedule from the keyboard where Professor Giacometti had been ignoring it. He had the uneasy impression that something irrevocable had changed in his friendship with Chris Giacometti. Something told him they won’t be eating stolen pharmaceutical grade during one of Otabek’s DJ gigs at the gay club anytime soon....

He was half out the door when Chris--no, Professor Giacometti, he corrected--called for his attention. “Hey, Otabek. I have just one question--”

Otabek paused at the doorway, and looked back over his shoulder at the the psychology professor, who seemed gay and pathetic in his fancy suit. “Yes?”

“The Effexor I used to get from Walgreens, those were real pills, right?”

Otabek made eye contact with Chris and nodded slowly. “That was real.” He paused. “So were the Vicodin, although your script wasn't.”

Chris’s voice was high and tense when he asked his next question. “How about the, uh... size pills you gave me?”

Otabek crossed his fingers and tapped himself in the chest. “Colombian pharmaceutical wonder drug. Very powerful medicine indeed. I swear.” 

Somehow, despite the promise and the gesture of confidence, Chris still had his doubts about that.

 

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turned out that Professor Giacometti was unwilling to risk his tenure in order to help Otabek get his degree without actually having to put any effort into learning anything. Which meant that Otabek actually _had_ to attend his class on French literature of the twentieth century every Tuesday and Thursday at 9 am like an _actual_ student.

It was while he was sitting in the cheap uncomfortable half-desk, half-chair contraption, half-slumped into his coffee cup which all of a sudden seemed to contain a woefully inadequate amount of caffeine, that Otabek saw him for the first time: the short, fine-boned blond man with green eyes and gauged ears who was beautiful in the kind of way that suggested something otherworldly. He didn't so much move as he _flit_ across the classroom into one of the chairs at the front, and Otabek stared at the back of his neck while he waited for class to begin. The thin fabric of his silky purple shirt draped over the delicate bones of his shoulder in a way that reminded Otabek of wings.

Otabek was no romantic. He was a rational man who didn't believe in things like love at first sight. But still, Otabek found that he could not look away.

The blonde boy caught Otabek looking when he ducked down to take his notebooks out of his backpack. He snarled, eyes sharp and calculating as a sniper’s as he returned Otabek’s stare. That singular look told Otabek everything he needed to know about the boy--Blondie had seen some shit, that was for sure.

Otabek had been about to introduce himself when the French professor stormed into the room, a short and fine-boned man who wore a shirt with numerous unnecessary ruffles. He had dark straight hair and almond-shaped eyes and his thick eyebrows were permanently arched in a scornful line as he launched into a lecture in lightly accented French.

“Now, people ask me, Monsieur Lee, why do you teach French? Why not Korean? Or computer science? Or even tae kwon do?” Even his eyebrows seemed thicker as he paused for dramatic effect. “I will tell you why I teach French: it is none of your business.” The professor looked at the class for an uncomfortable minute.

Somebody coughed. The professor’s eyebrows furrowed, and the cough stopped immediately. When the room was perfectly silent, Monsieur Lee continued. “This semester, we will be reading Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece _Waiting for Godot,_ whose central theme is ennui.” The Professor made a large arm gesture that caused the ruffles on his shirt to ripple. “Now, who can define _ennui_ for us?”

“Boredom,” one of the other students, a girl with long brown hair and violet eyes, said in a low rich voice.

“Ah, yes. But ennui refers to a very _particular_ sort of boredom,” Professor Lee said, drooping against his desk as he raised his hand to his brow in a theatrical swoon. “A sort of lethargic disappointment rooted in the fundamental emptiness of existence.”

Otabek looked over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of the blond boy one last time. He was leaned over his notebook, scrawling attentively as the professor read the text. Huh, Otabek thought. Seemed Blondie gave a shit about French. 

Otabek, who never gave a shit about anything, suddenly gave a shit about that.

 

 

The next day, Otabek fidgeted in his desk chair as he waited for Psychology 101 to begin. It was already past ten-thirty, and the professor still hadn’t arrived--

At just that moment, Professor Giacometti swept into class two minutes late, smelling of cheap booze and expensive cologne. Otabek raised an eyebrow knowingly, but Chris merely glared back as he settled himself behind the cheap metal desk at the front of the classroom.

Well. This was certainly awkward.

Otabek had not seen his old clubbing buddy Chris Giacometti in a week, not since Chris had informed him that he would not help Otabek cheat his way through community college. Otabek was still pissed about that...

Not to mention that it was weird know that in his spare time, your professor mixed Vicodin with white wine and had anonymous sex, or that his promiscuity was really just an expression of his deep-seated anxieties about the size of his penis, but Otabek supposed it was for the best if he forgot about that stuff completely and concentrated on passing Psychology 101.

“Now, class, please open your books to Chapter Seven. We will begin our semester with a discussion of gender and sexuality, which are two of the most important facet of the human psyche.” Professor Giacometti grasped a dry-erase marker in a limp-wristed grip and began scrawling notes on the whiteboard as he spoke. “As you may have heard, I myself am something of an expert in gender and sexuality, and this semester, I am here to teach you all that I know.” He pushed his round glasses up his nose, winking at a tall man with an undercut who was seated in the front row.

The undercut guy with whom Professor Giacometti was flirting bore a curious resemblance to Otabek's roommate from boarding school in Montreal. But what the hell was JJ doing at a community college in Detroit? The last thing he wanted was for this JJ guy to recognize him and attempt to befriend him... Otabek hated that guy. He shrank back in his seat, trying to avoid being noticed as he tuned back into the lecture just in time to catch another of the professor's lewd jokes, and Otabek had to stifle a chuckle. Professor Chris certainly had his priorities straight, which was a weird thing to say about a gay man. His mind began to wander again by the time Chris enumerated all the different possible genders to the class.

“Bullshit! There are only two genders,” one of the bro types at the front of the classroom asserted, interrupting Otabek's daydream. A couple of other students laughed and fist-pumped their agreement.

A voice rang out from the back of the classroom. “Fuck. That.” Otabek turned in his seat.

The beautiful blond man from Otabek’s French class was half out of his chair in a defensive crouch. “Gender is a spectrum, you stupid shit,” he spat.

Somehow, Otabek hadn’t realized how short the blond guy was in French class. But he was nearly standing up now, still very short.

“Despite your vulgar language, you are exactly right.” The professor lisped into a long lecture about hormones, and the brain, and the numerous gender identities.

Otabek considered himself an educated queer, but by the end of Professor Giacometti’s first class, his head was already swimming.

“Now class, don’t forget. Everyone is required to take the Sexual Behavior exam for this course. Your must complete the questionnaire in full by October 15th. Anyone who fails to do so will have an entire letter grade subtracted from their final grade.” The class groaned.

Professor Giacometti tutted in an extremely gay expression of disapproval. “This is non-negotiable. Now, students, please turn your attention to the top of page 191...” 

The blond man somehow managed to evade Otabek after psych class as well. Oh well. Otabek was certain to see him again soon enough. They both had French literature of the 20th century at 9 tomorrow morning, after all.

 

 

“I’m only half-Japanese, really,” said the short guy with the bleached-blond hair and red streaks styled like something out of an anime. Ever since that first French literature class two days ago, the shrimp had attached himself to Otabek, who wasn’t even quite sure about what his name was. It seemed to be the only thing about himself that he hadn’t yet told Otabek. 

“Uh-huh.” Otabek didn’t want to encourage him; he had already been talking for about fifteen minutes straight.

“Yeah, my other half is Korean. That’s my mom’s half. My dad is the Japanese one. Everyone’s always really surprised when they find out he’s Japanese, because he has this really angry air around him all the time. But it’s like, just because he’s Japanese they expect him to be polite? Anyway they’re divorced. My dad is a good guy, underneath all the anger. Although my mom did leave him because he’s angry. And he _is_ angry because she’s Korean,” the short kid with the brightly colored hair admitted. He was quiet for a moment as he considered this, and Otabek was about to make his excuses and get the hell away from this tiny human with hair in the shape of a rooster when said tiny human started talking again. “Anyway I’m Kenjirou. Kenjirou Minami.”

“Otabek Altin,” Otabek sighed. “Nice to know you, and then meet you. In that order.” He closed his book. There was no way he was going to be getting any work done while he was trapped like this.

“That’s a weird name. I never heard that name before. Hey, have you heard about Tamaki on Ice? It’s the best. It’s got this ice skater with anxiety who’s in love with his coach. It’s a love story but it’s also....”

Otabek zoned out. He’d heard about the show, of course, but also he didn’t care. He looked around the atrium, trying to find something more interesting to pay attention to that Minami’s weird obsession with gay ice skating.

There he was, that beautiful blond boy from French class, next to the kiosk that sold crappy coffee just outside of the library. There was a line behind him, but he took his time, heedless of the impatient students cursing him for requesting a very certain banana muffin from the pastry case.

“‘Scuse me,” he murmured to Kenjirou. “Watch my stuff for a minute?”

“OK. Where are you go--”

Otabek shoved in his chair, which scraped against the linoleum with a harsh sound. He double checked his pockets for his wallet before heading over to the kiosk and sidling up next to the blonde guy with the green eyes to lay a five dollar bill on the counter. “Hey, Frenchy! Do you want me to buy you a coffee, or not?” he asked in his deepest voice. Otabek did not smile, but he did maintain intense eye contact. He had a feeling that Blondie would understand.

The young man shook his head, his shoulder-length blond hair swaying in panic. “No. No no no no. You do _not_ get to hit on me.”

Otabek sputtered for a moment before regaining his composure. “I’m not hitting on you,” he denied, rolling his eyes for emphasis.

The boy raised one blond brow, and his forehead wrinkled up. He seemed skeptical of Otabek and wasn’t bothering to hide it. “You’re not?”

“I’m not!” Otabek insisted before introducing himself. “I’m Otabek Altin.... We have French literature together with Professor Lee. Remember?”

The blond boy shrugged. “I guess I never noticed you.”

“Oh?” Otabek flashed a quick smile. “Are you saying I’m forgettable?”

The blond flashed Otabek a warning glare. “I thought you said you weren’t hitting on me.”

Otabek shrugged. “I’m not. I just wanted to tell you about my French literature study group. It meets in the library, at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

The man tucked a lock of blonde hair behind his ear and looked at Otabek skeptically. “I find it hard to believe that you know much of anything about French literature,” he muttered under his breath.

“Why? Because I look Asian?” Otabek raised an eyebrow. He had switched from English to Russian, and the blond guy blanched when he realized what Otabek was saying. “I’m Kazakh, by the way. Former members of the USSR, you’ll recall.”

The blond man  made a sound that was neither French, nor English, nor Russian.

Otabek shook his head. “All you Russians are the same. So racist.”

“I’m not _racist.”_ The blond boy spat the word out, altogether far too defensively in the kind of way that only made him sound all the more racist.

“Prove it,” Otabek taunted him. “Come to the study group tomorrow and see what I’ve got.” 

The man narrowed his bright green eyes until they were as sharp as daggers. He simply grabbed the coffee from the counter and stormed off without saying whether or not he would bother taking Otabek up on his invitation.

 

 

Otabek arrived at the library five minutes early, which was went against his usual five-minutes-late policy. Somehow it didn’t surprise him to see that the blond boy from yesterday was already there, with a defiantly lidless cup of black coffee cooling next to the biggest powdered sugar doughnut Otabek had ever seen in his life.

“Oh, hello,” Otabek said, sitting down in the chair nearest to the guy and  feigning surprise. The blonde boy glared and said nothing.

With a smirk, Otabek tore a sheet of paper out of his notebook. “So, the most important part of any study group is accountability. We should exchange contact information, you know, like email, phone number. Names. That stuff.”

The blond man’s glare didn’t seem to get any softer. He did, however, grudgingly scrawl out his name in block letters: _Yuri Plisetsky_ , it read. Huh. “Well, Yuri,” Otabek began, but he was interrupted by two other students at the door--Kenjirou Minami and the tall nerdy kid that Otabek recognized.

“Oh. Well, you said it was a study _group_ , not a study _date_ ,” Yuri said, flashing a pearly-white smile that was as derogatory as it was brilliant. “So I invited a couple of people from class... Hope you don’t mind!” He held the expression just a bit too long, the challenge blatant.

Otabek cleared his throat. “Of course not. Um, Nice of you to join us, Minami, and... you too, JJ....” He passed the contact sheet across the table reluctantly, hyperaware of Yuri’s critical green eyes watching him as silently and intently as a sniper. “I guess you can add your information to the contact sheet. Name and email and phone number, anything else you think would be useful.”

“Oh, so you remember me after all,” the nerdy tall guy with the bowl cut and the bad maple leaf tattoo said as he wrote down his information in blocky letters. “If you remember me from high school, you’ll remember that I went to McGill University on a full scholarship, but then lost my financial aid package and had to withdraw after a bad bout of anxiety due to the demands of everyone’s expectations after semester... Now I’m here in Detroit, where no one knows who I am, and there’s so much less pressure to succeed--”

“Ok, JJ, that’s great, but for the record, I didn’t ask.” Otabek was impatient for Minami for finish scrawling down his half-dozen social media accounts to listen to JJ anyway. Finally, the tiny man with the hair of a cartoon handed the paper back to Otabek, who self-consciously tucked it into his notebook pocket.

Otabek opened his copy of _Waiting for Godot._ “Ok then. Let’s get started. I’ll be Vladimir, if someone wants to be Estragon?”

JJ raised his hand. “Me! Pick me!”

Unfortunately, no one else volunteered for the task. “OK then. JJ... will be Estragon,” Otabek conceded. He cleared his throat, and read his line: “‘Sometimes, I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer. How shall I say... Relieved and at the same time ap-palled’.” He popped the “p” as instructed by the stage directions. “‘Funny. Nothing to be done’.”

When Otabek finished speaking, Yuri looked appalled. Then JJ read the following lines of dialogue, and Yuri was apoplectic.

“I don’t know what language you think you’re speaking, but that’s not French,” he said in accentless _francais._ “Where did you two learn to mangle such a beautiful language so completely?”

“We went to boarding school together in Montreal,” JJ explained. 

“Ah.” Yuri drew his lips in tight. It made his sharp features look even more severe. “Well, it looks like we’ll _really_ have to start from the basics with you two. Let’s begin with the French phonetic alphabet....”

 

 

 

 

Two hours of intensive French phoneme pronunciation exercises later, Otabek’s jaw and throat were beginning to hurt. He wasn’t used to making those kinds of sounds, and it showed. His voice was raw and raspy by the time that Minami and JJ packed up their bags.

The rest of the students immediately headed out after the French lesson, but Otabek stayed back. “I don’t remember you from last year,” Yuri said. He took the pencil from his bun, and his hair immediately unravelled itself from where it had been knotted at the top of his head.

“Oh. That’s because I wasn’t a student until recently,” Otabek explained, zipping up his leather jacket and winding his thick grey scarf around his neck. “I was a pharmacist until a few weeks ago, actually.”

“Oh. Did you lose your job in the recession or something?” Yuri clucked his tongue, impatient.

“... Something like that.”

“Well, what happened?” Yuri asked, looking at Otabek expectantly.

“Oh. Well, my supervisor found out that I... didn’t actually have a diploma,” Otabek admitted.

Yuri’s blonde eyebrows narrowed. “No way.”

Otabek shrugged. “Yeah.”

“That’s... dark.” When Yuri smiled, he flashed a hint of incisor. Otabek could tell instantly his approval rating had gone up, at least in Yuri’s regard.

“Something’s wrong with you and JJ,” Yuri said. Though he was still glaring, Otabek couldn’t help but notice the genuine affection in his eyes as Yuri insulted him. “You know all the words, but you can’t say them properly. It’s weird.”

“ _Ouiais_.” The sound was not unlike that of a bleating goose, and Yuri flinched when he heard it “That’s Quebecois for _yes_ , you know,” Otabek explained to a confused Yuri, who seemed unable to translate the noise into anything he could recognize without help.

“You sound just like those annoying ass geese when you speak French,” Yuri scoffed in familiar Russian. If Otabek hadn’t know better, he might have thought that Yuri sounded almost _fond_.

“Huh,” Otabek said, thoughtful. “I suppose I do.” 

Yuri looked at him strangely when they get to the courtyard, then crossed to the arts building on the far side of campus. Otabek had no more classes for the day, so he simply revved his motorcycle and rode home, lost in thought: Yuri was not quite what he’d been expecting him to be, and he wasn’t sure whether he was more scared or surprised by that. Strangely enough, all things considered, Otabek was more curious about the beautiful Russian student with the soldier’s sharp stare than anything else.

 

 

Next Monday, Otabek was surprised to see that the French study group had grown to include a silver haired older guy from Professor Lee’s Monday/Wednesday course, as well as the violet-eyed girl from Otabek’s literature and psych classes. He was slightly disappointed that Yuri hadn’t made it, and double checked his phone just to see if he had cancelled...

Unfortunately, Otabek didn’t seem to have gotten any such message. Well, fuck. He should have expected this. A man as beautiful as Yuri was probably more than he deserved.

“So there’s this part where Vladmir says something,” Minami squeaked, “‘All I know is that the hours are long and constrain us to beguile them with proceedings which ... may at first sight seem reasonable, until they become a habit.’ Do you think he’s referring to the futility of life the Professor Lee is always talking about? Because it seems like--”

The door slammed, interrupting Minami’s monologue. Otabek looked up, surprised to see Yuri had made to the study group after all. He was towing along a buff-looking redheaded girl who was wearing a curious mixture of flannel and gym clothes.

“Sorry I’m late,” Yuri growled.

“Thanks so much for inviting me, Yuri!” the girl with the shoulder-length red hair said. She was wearing a midriff-baring shirt under her oversized flannel, which she’d paired with baggy black sweatpants and a septum ring. Otabek decided she was cute in the same way a Molotov cocktail was cute: small, self-contained, and with a great capacity for destruction.

“Don’t thank me. I already regret this,” Yuri grumbled. He looked mildly annoyed to see the two newcomers, as there were only two chairs left. He sat down in the chair nearest to Otabek, and Mila sat down next to Minami. Her red hair matched the red streaks Minami had dyed into his.

Absently, Otabek wondered if they used the same hair dye. The colors were suspiciously similar...

Minami introduced himself to the newcomer immediately. “Hi. I’m Kenjirou Minami. You can just call me Kenjirou. Are you in French lit as well? I don’t think I saw you in class? Are you in the same block as Viktor?”

Yuri’s friend smiled at Minami and sat down in the empty chair next to the short and excitable man. “Oh yeah, I’m in Professor Lee’s Monday and Wednesday literature class. But we don’t have a study group like you guys do!” She seemed to have a fondness for small loud people, Otabek noted.

“It was Otabek’s idea,” Minami said. “Did you know that he learned French in boarding school? That’s how he knows JJ. JJ speaks French because he’s French Canadian. Which is not like being regular Canadian--”

“Shut up, Minami. We’re here to study, not listen to your whole life story,” Yuri grumbled. He was about to open his dog-eared copy of _Godot,_ but a certain silver haired someone at the opposite end of the table distracted him. “You!” Yuri said, pointing to the silver-haired stranger, who feigned ignorance . “Yeah, you, Victor!” he grumbled. “I thought I left you in Russia! What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Oh, Mila invited me,” the tall old guy with the grey hair said casually. “I’m going back to school, Yurochka!” Otabek could see just how proud of himself the guy was; he practically _preened_ at the announcement.

“Psssht. You’re like a million years old. Why would you do that, and in Detroit of all places?” Yuri spat.

Viktor pushed his silver bangs out of his eyes. “I didn’t tell you...? My husband got a job in the States.”

Yuri yanked on a handful of his own hair. “No Viktor, you didn’t fucking tell me. And really, your husband got a job in _Detroit_ of all places?”

Viktor shrugged. “I guess the production team gets a lot of tax breaks for it? So we bought a house here. It’s better for the kids if we’re not travelling all the time. It didn’t hurt that Detroit has some of the lowest property values in the country. Do you know how weak the ruble is right now?”

“Yes, I know how weak the ruble is!” Yuri yelped, glaring at Viktor. “In case you forgot, I’m studying art in Detroit and not like, in Paris at the Sorbonne.”

“Hey, I’m a Russian immigrant too,” Mila interrupted, pouting. “Why do you think I’m majoring in women's studies in community college here and not like, Sarah Lawrence?”

“Same,” Minami said, uncharacteristically subdued. “Japan’s economy might be doing OK, but I was raised on a pig farm. My dad worked hard to send me to school in the US, but he doesn’t have a lot of money or anything. He’s just a single dad, you know?”

Huh. Raised on a pig farm. Otabek had to admit that that explained a few things about the kid...

The Sara spoke up. “My brother Mickey and I came here from Italy to get away from our parents.” The brunette with the pleasing purple eyes had a surprisingly sensual voice, low and smooth. “We walked away from a trust fund that would have been little more than indentured servitude, and now we’re undocumented immigrants who work in a shady Mob restaurant to pay the bills.” She sighed. “Detroit Community College isn’t much, but it’s the start of a better life. A life we can say we chose for ourselves.”

Even Otabek had to agree. “I used have a good middle-class job. A nice apartment and a lot of expensive recording gear.” He took a deep breath and let the words out. “But it all fell apart because I wasted the first half of my twenties scheming my way through life.” He paused. Yuri seemed to be looking directly at him from the corner of his eyes, as though feigning disinterest.

Otabek chuckled sarcastically. “The worst thing is I wasted all that money and goodwill. Now, I’ve pawned all my music gear, live in a basement with two other roommates, and I’m getting my degree in order to qualify for the job I’ve had for three years.”

Everyone around the table nodded. They all could emphasize. Except for JJ, who chose that moment to inform them of that fact loudly. “I have no idea what you guys are talking about. Ever since the 45th president was inaugurated, the Canadian economy has grown at an unprecedented rate, which has multiplied my family’s already considerable net worth by a factor of 1.8...” 

“JJ. Shut up, please,” Otabek said, and the table erupted in laughter. “Now, there’s a quote I’d like to get your opinions on.” He cleared his throat dramatically, then intoned: “‘But behind this veil of gentleness and peace, night is charging. And soon it will burst upon us” (here Otabek stops and snaps, according to the stage directions), “just when we least expect it. That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.’” He grinned dangerously, looking down the long table at his friends, whose raucous laughter earned the group another warning from Lead Librarian Lilia Baranovskaya.

 

 

“And when Vladimir asks the boy if he has a message from Mr Godot, what does the boy say?” Surprisingly, Professor Lee’s shirt today did not feature any elaborate ruffles. It was worse--the loose-fitting peasant-style blouse was embroidered with bells that made an annoying tinkling sound with every step he took.

JJ’s hand shot up in the air. Professor Lee ignored him for a full minute, until it became clear that no one else was willing to volunteer. “Yes, JJ?”

JJ made a flashy symbol with his fingers. “‘Mr Godot told me to tell you that he won’t come tonight but surely he will come tomorrow’.” He quoted the line from memory perfectly, but the effect was ruined by his bleating Quebecois accent.

Professor Lee cringed, but grudgingly accepted JJ’s poorly-pronounced answer.

“Throughout the play the protagonists wait, and nothing memorable seem to happen. From this one can surmise that time has no meaning,” Mr Lee lectured as he paced across the front of his classroom. “ _Waiting for Godot’s_ genius is that it emphasizes the common nature of waiting among all people; it suggests that the meaningless of time is universal. If one is always waiting for something to happen, the periods during that wait end up being meaningless, and, if the event finally does happen, the process repeats itself. If that something never occurs all time becomes a meaningless wait. In any case, one is always caught in a period in which time has no purpose and waiting is the only goal.”

Wow, Otabek thought. This guy really was deranged. Somehow that fact hadn’t prevented Professor Lee from getting tenure, which was really saying something about the standards here Detroit Community College.

 

 

“Today’s assignment will require a partner. We’re going to be doing some role-playing,” Professor Giacommetti announced. The class looked at him, appalled. “No class, not like that.” He gave his students a withering look. “We are going to be practicing out conflict resolution skills. So get yourselves a partner and let’s get ready to communicate!”

Yuri made a dramatic retching noise into his elbow, but Otabek ignored him and held out his hand for Yuri to shake. “You wanna be my partner or not?”

Yuri didn’t shake right away. In fact, at first he looked taken aback. “Are you sure about that?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I don’t exactly resolve my conflicts. You’ll fail,” Yuri warned.

Otabek offered his hand again. “That’s OK. I think my GPA can handle it.”

“Fine,” Yuri said. They shook on it, a fact which Otabek began to regret about five minutes into the exercise.

“Yuri,” Otabek warned in a tortured voice as he dug his fingers into his own scalp, “Why are you so fucking stubborn?”

“I _warned_ you,” Yuri snarled.

Well, Otabek couldn’t argue with that. He sighed, gave up, and let Yuri have his goddamn way.

 

 

The semester carried on, Otabek settled into a rhythm between classes and evenings at the studio, and the study group kept meeting every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. He was so busy he was was surprised to realize that October was already half over; midterms started next week.

“Hey, what rhymes with _amour?”_ Viktor asked, casually stroking his pen across his lips, interrupting Otabek’s furious highlighting of a dense critical analysis about the meaningless of time in _Godot_.

“Lots of things,” Yuri answered immediately. “Contre-couer, auteur, voyeur--”

“Hmm.” Viktor was starting to chew on his pen. “That last one actually has some potential....”

Yuri cringed. “Eww. Gross. Are you writing another erotic love poem to your husband?”

Viktor chewed on his pen a little bit more, brow drawn in thought. “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“Gross,” Yuri snarled. “Fuck, Viktor, you’re like eighty years old, and you’re back in community college. What did you do in your life to deserve this? Please tell me so that I can avoid ending up like you.”

“Well, first of all, I’m only 33 years old. And second of all, I have a husband and two kids and a job, so I’d say I’m doing pretty well in my life so far. And just so you know, I had a degree--in Russia. It’s not the same thing.” Viktor did a complicated thing between his tongue, somehow managing to continue gnawing then pen as he spoke. “I can’t be a practicing dermatologist if I keep failing the Boards because my English is so bad.”

Mila wrinkled her brow. “Viktor, why are you taking French literature if your English is so terrible?”

Viktor shrugged. “Easy A,” he explained.

Yuri leaned back in his chair and put his feet on the table. “Whatever. You’re lucky your husband makes so much money and can afford to keep you and your two brats besides.”

“It’s true! I’m a very lucky man,” Viktor agreed, which made Yuri groan again. “Now, help me find another word that rhymes with ‘voyeur’,” Viktor demanded. He slurped his pen for a few moments before Yuri exploded.

“Literally _everything_ rhymes with voyeur!” Yuri exploded. “Bambocheur, concasseur, dominateur--”

“Ooh! Dominateur! I can make that work...” Viktor removed the pen from his mouth long enough to scribble something in his notebook then put it back between his lips.

“Ugh, you’re fucking awful. I don’t know why I bother helping you,” Yuri grumbled.

“Sure you do, Yuri. You like showing off,” Otabek teased him.

“No way! I do not.”

“Of course you do.” Otabek said, confident. “Good thing JJ’s not here today. He’d beat you to all the answers.”

“Oh my God guys, can you stop this shit?” Mila interrupted. “I still have absolutely no idea what’s going on in this entire play! I literally have no idea what to do for my research paper.”

Viktor went pale at the mention of _research paper_. “We have a research paper? Wait, when is it due?”

“You need to get your head checked, old man, you forget _everything--”_ Yuri launched into another rant, but Otabek chose to ignore him. He shifted his attention to the other side of the table, where Mila and Sara were still discussing possible themes for their papers.

“Mila, do you need help choosing a topic?” Sarah asked. “I have two ideas for mine, but I’m not sure which one I prefer....”

“Oh my God, thank you, thank you, thank you... my Kinseyology class is kicking my _ass_.” Mila crossed herself dramatically and Yuri made a long-suffering growling sound.

“What’s Kinseyology?” Sara asked, altogether too innocently. Otabek had the feeling that Sara knew exactly what Mila had been saying, and was only asking because she was interested in hearing Mila speak.

Mila adjusted her snapback hat, pushing it back a bit on her hairline so that her eyes were a bit more visible (for flirting purposes, Otabek noted). “It’s a study of sexuality, based on the work of Thomas Kinsey. You’ve heard the concept that sexuality is a spectrum before right?”

Sarah looked altogether too into Mila’s impromptu rant about the evils of compulsory heterosexuality and cisnormativity while the rest of the table discussed whether or not ennui was a symptom of alienation in an increasingly industrialized and digitized world.

FInally, Yuri interrupted Mila’s lecture, just as she had gotten to the part about phallocentrism and the rise of factory farming. While she shot him an accusing look in the moment, he knew she would thank him later. If she had been allowed to continue her monologue, she would have been sure to alienate Sara as a potential sexual partner by the time she had begun to link her veganism to the intersectionality of her feminist philosophy.

“Look, Mila, you promised you’d give me a ride home if I proofread your French homework,” Yuri prodded. “I did that. Now can we go?”

Otabek checked his watch. Sure enough, it was getting close to five-thirty, and he had chemistry in the B building several blocks away. “Actually, I’ve got to head over to the science building in a few...”

“Mila, _come on_ ,” Yuri nagged.

Mila paused her lecture to Sara long enough to look at Yuri beseechingly and pout, “Can’t it wait?”

“No, dingbat,” Yuri scoffed. As if that stupid expression would work on him. He’d known Mila long enough to be immune to her cheap tricks. “In case you forgot, I have ballet class tonight. I can’t be late again because your gay ass is too busy trying to hit on the only other female-identifying person in our friend group.”

Mila had the decency to look at least a little bit ashamed of herself for being so thirsty. “Well then, we should catch up about the research topics tomorrow after class, Sara. Sorry I can’t do it today.”

“Oh, no worries!” Sara said. “Buy me coffee and I’ll forgive you.” She battered the long lashes of her violet eyes suggestively. “Tomorrow at the campus coffee shop in the Quad, 8:30 tomorrow morning. If you’re late I’ll make you buy me a croissant!” Sara threatened, and Mila giggled but agreed.

When Mila tried to hug her goodbye, though, Sara dodged her flirtatiously. “Hey! I’m not going to forgive you until you buy me that coffee, you know.”

Yuri crossed his eyes and gagged. When he opened the door, the study group burst out laughing, earning a stern look from Lead Librarian Lilia Baranovskaya as well as the weird guy from the Spanish department who was always hanging around outside the door during their meetings.

Otabek almost stumbled into the half-familiar man who was lurking at the study room door. The guy was holding a book on erectile dysfunction remedies upside down, although Otabek was not sure why he even bothered, considering that he was very obviously ignoring the book in favor of trying to peek through the small glass pane on the study room door.

“Hey, Mickey,” Mila said, real casual-like. Otabek had to admit he was impressed by her nonchalance. Generally, whenever he was confronted men behaving suspiciously, he did not try to engage them in conversation.

“Hey Mila,” Mickey said, sounding distracted as he turned the page of his book without looking at it.

“Are you looking for Sara?” she asked.

“Tch. No.” The man made a sound that was altogether too casual to actually be casual. “Why? “Have you seen her?” He sounded very eager all of a sudden.

Mila shrugged. “I’m sure she’ll be back soon,” she said. “Take care, Mickey.”

Otabek gave her so much side-eye he was not sure why his eyeballs did not fall out of his head. “Who the fuck was that?” he whispered to Yuri.

“Oh. Just Mickey Crispino.” When Otabek looked at him blankly, he added,“You know, Sara’s twin brother.”

“That’s her twin brother?” Otabek asked, incredulous.

“Yeah, why?”

“I thought that was her _stalker.”_

“Hmmm.” Mila’s expression was drawn tight as she considered. “It’s... complicated. Mickey and Sara are very... protective of one another.”

“Protective?” Otabek grimaced. He shot a skeptical glance Yuri’s way, but Yuri just shrugged.

“They’ve had to look out for each other for a very long time,” Mila said, matter-of-fact. “I don’t know if they know how to be apart. Like, Mickey has to take Spanish this semester because all the French lit courses closed up before he registered. He’s having a very difficult time with that.”

Otabek did not bother asking any more questions after that. He had a feeling he would not like the answers, not one bit.

 

 

“So you see class, it’s important not to pathologize someone’s kinks. What you’re into does not determine who you are as a person, although it can certainly be influenced by it,” Professor Giacometti lisped his way through the lecture.

It was ironic, Otabek reflected, that he would end up learning so much about sexuality and sexual expression at a time when he was abstinent. It had been a couple of months since his last tryst, and his crush on Yuri wasn’t helping his overactive libido, either.

He gazed at Yuri from the corner of his eye. The blond man was hunched over his notebook, scribbling furiously in his left-handed scrawl. Otabek didn’t have to see his notes to know that Yuri’s handwriting would be borderline illegible.

“Don’t forget to hand in your sexual behavior surveys on the way out, class,” the professor chided. “I’ll be offering extra credit this semester to one student to help me analyze the data.”

JJ all but shot out of his seat. “Ooh, pick me!”

“No way!” Sarah exclaimed, trying to stand but her legs got tangled up on her desk, nearly tipping her forward completely. She managed to recover just in time by sitting back down into her chair to keep from going over. “Professor Giacometti, sir, I’ve _always_ wanted to grow up to be a therapist--”

But the professor paid her no mind, instead choosing to focus on the patch of skin peeking out from where JJ’s Canadian flag sweatshirt had ridden up his abdomen. “All _interested parties_ ,” he lisped meaningfully, “should see me during my office hours for an interview.”

JJ preened while Sara glared. Otabek cocked an amused eyebrow at Yuri, who finally looked up from his messy notebook to bare his teeth at Otabek.

The guy somehow managed to look cute even when he was _snarling,_ and Otabek had to pretend to be interested his own mostly-blank notebook to hide the heat that flared in his cheeks whenever Yuri flashed his canines.

Finally, Professor Giacometti dismissed the class with a final warning about submitting their sexual behavior surveys on time. Otabek joined the line of students in their walk of shame, as they personally handed their anonymous surveys to their professor one-by-one.

Yuri was waiting by the door when Otabek finally slipped out into the hallway. “So, today was the due date for that sex test Professor Giacommetti gave us...” Yuri said.

“So?” Otabek asked.

They were standing in line at the coffee kiosk in the atrium. After psychology, both Yuri and Otabek had a free period, and they had taken to getting coffee together at the kiosk in the atrium before their next class. Sometimes they would head to the library to study, but lately they’d taken to wandering around the courtyard and talking.

Otabek had learned a lot about Yuri over coffee: that Yuri lived with his grandfather and his grumpy cat. That Yuri had gone away to college when he was 18, but had had to leave when his grandfather had gotten his cancer diagnosis and was just now returning to school, now that his grandfather’s condition was stable. That he loved to dance, especially ballet, but he could also dance jazz and a little bit of hip-hop.

And Otabek had told Yuri things too. About how Otabek left Kazakhstan for boarding school at the age of fourteen and never returned. How all those years of hustling to provide for himself had made Otabek willing to cheat. How he did all his best thinking on long, quiet motorcycle rides without a destination.

The barista, a young guy long brown hair and a Spanish accent, interrupted his contemplation. “Hey, whatchu need?”

Otabek snapped back to reality. “Just a large coffee.”

The other barista, a cute boy with floppy brown hair and a sweet accent, cursed. He’d dropped a latte, and was holding his burnt hand and whimpering. The Spanish barista ran over to his coworker, and cooed soothingly. “It’s OK, Ji-baby. Leo will get you some ice, and then we can clean up this mess.” The cute boy pouted, and the Spanish guy gave him a little kiss “to make it better” before getting the ice and returning to the counter.

It was cute, Otabek thought as he watched the Spanish guy hover over his injured friend. It had been a long time since Otabek had had someone to kiss him better when he hurt himself...

“Aren’t you nervous?” Yuri asked, picking up their coffee from the counter and handing one to Otabek, who immediately began dumping sugar packets into his cup.

“I don’t think it’s the kind of test that you can fail, Yuri.”

Yuri blushed. “I know that, stupid.”

Otabek took a sip of coffee and made a face. No matter how much sugar he added to the kiosk coffee, it always tasted like boat fuel. “I don’t know, what are you so worried about then?”

“I’m not _worried,_ ” Yuri said defensively.

“You think Professor Giacometti is going to find out about your hidden kinks?” Otabek joked.

Yuri wasn’t laughing.

Huh.

“Nevermind. It’s just stupid,” Yuri said, kicking at a wadded-up scrap of paper on the floor before changing the subject. “So what did you think about that article I sent you? The one about the role of metaphysical anguish in absurdism?"

“Well, first of all,” Otabek began, “I have a lot of metaphysical anguish, but I don’t think that makes me absurd...”

Yuri punched his arm, and laughed. “Newsflash, asshole. You’ve been absurd this whole time.”

Otabek, much as he would have liked to defend himself, could not argue otherwise.

 

 

Otabek was drifting off in French class. It was altogether far too early in the morning, especially considering he had drunk nearly an entire six pack of Pabst to his face the night before.

It was all Yuri’s fault. The blond boy had called fifteen minutes before midnight to inform Otabek that he was on his way to pick him up, and that under no circumstances should he forget his ID. Yuri had taken him to buy alcohol, then driven him to a desolate block of ramshackle houses, pointing out where he’d lived with his mother as a young boy.

The house was-long abandoned, windows boarded and roof caving, while they sat in the silent car and Yuri spoke. Otabek had stayed silent, taking sip after sip until he’d drunk five of the cheap beers without even realizing. It was nearly four AM when Yuri, completely sober, drove a drunken Otabek back home. As a result, Otabek had only been able to catch two hours of sleep before his alarm blared.

He blinked his bleary eyes, trying to focus on the lecture. Monsieur Lee’s many necklaces tinkled as he gestured. “And then Estragon says, ‘I feel worse when I’m with you. I also feel better alone’.” His eyes widened as he flailed at the class. “So you see, class, all relationships are futile. There is no such thing as the ability to truly touch another human being--we are all negatively charged electrons constantly repelling one another as we drift aimlessly in space, never seeing one another, never touching a thing...”

Sometimes Otabek was concerned for Monsieur Lee’s mental health. As much as he hated the man, it was hard not to notice that the professor was a little hung up on the futility of existence. He fidgeted in his seat, which scraped a little against the floor, and Yuri shared a knowing smirk with him as Monsieur Lee droned on.

“Don’t you see? Sooner or later, we are all victims of entropy. Everything, even love, tends toward destruction because the universe is continuously collapsing into chaos.”

Yuri smirked dangerously before he raised his hand. He interrupted the wildly ranting professor, whose necklaces made another annoying noise.

Though the professor continued to rant, he interrupted to impertinently ask “Monsieur Lee, I don’t know if you’re talking about existential absurdism here anymore. This is more like, existential nihilist theory than anything else.”

Monsieur Lee fell silent, caught in the middle of some complicated gesture.

Yuri looked at the professor condescendingly. “Nihilism? You know, the Russian philosophy that has its roots in the assassination of Tsarist monarchy and argues that life is without any meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value?” He raised his eyebrow

Monsieur Lee leaned forward, cautiously interested in what Yuri had to say.

“You know, my life certainly changed for the better once I discovered nihilism,” Yuri said, winking dangerously at Otabek, who swallowed hoarsely before returning Yuri’s dangerous grin.

He gathered his wits well enough to join Yuri’s joke. “Wow, nihilism really changed my life too,” Otabek said. “Once you perceive the pointlessness of existence, your whole perception of what is possible really changes, you know?”

Monsieur’s eyes perked at the corners with dark interest as Yuri and Otabek extolled the virtues of the existentially nihilistic lifestyle. The themes of hopelessness and destruction really seemed to speak to the man, who asked many questions about the nihilists and their habits. Some of their other classmates seemed eager to join the discussion, sharing their own experiences of existentialist despair as the class devolved into something of a postmodern group therapy session.

With the professor and the rest of the class distracted, Yuri leaned back in his seat and raised his eyebrows at Otabek ridiculously. Otabek had to cover his smirk with his hand. He couldn’t help but admire the man for masterminding this distraction from Monsieur Lee’s increasingly unhinged lectures on the futility of existence. 

Yuri’s answering smile was lopsided and emphasized the sharpness of his incisor. It made Otabek squirm: somehow Yuri was at his most beautiful when he was also a little bit cruel. Otabek bit his lip and tightened his grip on his pen, trying his damnedest not to think about the Sexual Behavior Survey tucked into the bottom of his backpack and what his response to Yuri’s sadistic smile could mean until Monsieur Lee dismissed the class with an order to write a 2500-word essay about the ways in which nihilism had improved their lives. At least Otabek knew the answers to that question already. 

 

 

Otabek sat back in his seat. Their study group had long since devolved into an argument over whether JJ or Sara deserved to be TA for their psych professor’s sexual behavior study.

“You don’t even care about psychology!” Sara accused. “You just want to suck up to the professor for a better grade. Unlike some of us, who actually, you know, like, want to be therapists.”

“JJ, you can’t be Professor Giacometti’s TA,” Yuri protested. He nudged Otabek with his elbow in obvious encouragement to back him up. Otabek just tipped his chair back forward silently, which earned him another glare and a light slap from Yuri.

He had to stifle a chuckle. Yuri looked cute when he was annoyed--his green eyes narrowed like a housecat’s, and Otabek swore that his pink ears even pressed closer to his skull.

“Sara, you wouldn’t want to be his TA anyway. It’s actually really boring. You basically just sit around while Professor Giacometti stares at you,” JJ assured her in his nasal voice. “In fact, there does not appear to be any actual psychology involved at all.”

Sara crossed her arms. “Is that supposed to make me feel better, or worse? Because I definitely feel worse.”

“Yeah JJ, that’s actually kind of a dick move,” Minami said. “Sara actually cares about psychology. And you’re kind of leading the professor on? I mean, you’re not even gay. Just really, really vain.”

Otabek snorted, and Yuri elbowed him, crooking an eyebrow. Otabek made an obscene gesture and nodded: JJ was the kind of guy who never minded flirting, who could even get his dick sucked by a dude and like it, but not the kind of person who’d reciprocate... Yuri’s eyes went wide, and Otabek had to stifle a chuckle at Yuri’s indignant reaction.

JJ hummed, ignoring Minami’s comments and Viktor’s enthusiastic agreement. He extracted a sheaf of papers from his binder with an exaggerated flourish that was most likely some kind of distraction technique.

The distraction was effective. Viktor leaned in, interested. “Well, what’s this?”

JJ smirked. “These are the sexual behavior exams.”

“JJ, it’s not nice kinkshame your classmates,” Otabek said. “You do realize that shit like this is why no one likes you, right?”

“Are you kidding me? People loved when I stole test results back in high school.”

“Yeah. That’s because you sucked up to teachers and stole the results _before_ the tests so everyone could cheat,” Otabek reminded him. “This is different. For starters, you stole the results _after_ the test was due.”

“Also, it’s not the kind of test where you get graded? It’s more of a pass/fail kind of thing,” Mila added.

“Well, actually, I think it will be fun to guess whose is whose,” Sara said. “It will be good practice for my future career as a therapist, for one thing.”

JJ smiled, and passed her the pile of papers. “Precisely.”

Sara accepted the pile of completed sex tests eagerly, immediately looking through them stack for something interesting. “Oooh, this person has a foot fetish! And they’re gay, too...” Sara pursed her lips. “This has to be Yurio! He’s always kicking people! Probably because he gets aroused by it.”

“What! I do _not_ have a foot fetish,” Yuri protested, but he did not object at all about being called gay. Otabek did not miss the significant look that Yuri tossed toward Viktor, who blushed and twiddled his thumbs.

“And that’s exactly the kind of reaction someone with a foot fetish would have,” Sara said matter-of-factly. “Oh, wow, did you see this one, JJ? This person is into... splooshing and balloon popping.” Her violet eyes widened. “I didn’t know those could be sexual things.”

“Oh, those are most definitely sexual things,” Minami assured her.

“But what are they?” Sara asked, making a stricken face.

“Well, balloon popping is self-explanatory. You sit on a balloon until it pops. Some people find it very arousing,” Minami said matter-of-factly. “And splooshing involves a lot of fluids, like--”

“OK, I think I’ve heard enough,” a pale Yuri interrupted just in time. Sara was so white she looked like she might faint at any moment.

Mila flung her arm around the stricken Sara in a gesture of comfort. “Oh, honey, don’t be scared. _Anything_ can be sexual.”

“Gross!” Yuri exclaimed, then slapped Mila with his French notebook. The entire study group burst out laughing.

Yakov the security guard rapped at the door. “Head Librarian Lilia Baranovskaya says this is your final warning.” The group immediately quieted down, although Minami and Viktor both had to bite their hands to keep from laughing.

The security guard tugged his fedora down over his ears again. “Another complaint and you’ll have to leave,” he warned before returning to his post next to Head Librarian Lilia Baranovskaya’s desk where he stood at her side in watchful wait like a well-trained Doberman. He closed the door behind him with an annoyed yank.

Stifling their laughter, the study group looked at each other, then back at their psychology textbooks for several long minutes until they calmed down.

“Um,” asked Viktor, breaking the silence with a curious snort, “what else is in there?”

“Well, this one’s a dominatrix who likes to have group sex,” JJ said.

“Oh, that’s easy. Otabek,” Sara, said, not missing a beat.

Everyone in the group seemed to accept that. Everyone, that is, except for Yuri, who flashed Otabek a knowing sort of smirk.

“And this one?” JJ pointed to a test filled out in red pen. “They like tying people up and androgyny.”

“That’s Viktor.” Sara’s voice was confident. However, Otabek was not so certain that she should be.

“So, this one has an exhibitionism and an incest--”

“Give me that one,” Sara said, which she shuffled into her pile of papers. No one said anything about that.

Sara grabbed the test that lay on the top of JJ’s stack. “What about this one?” Sara asked. “They like.... having someone tie them up and pretend to eat them?” Her voice shrank into a high pitched squeak. “And... bloodplay?” She spoke the last syllable at a piercing pitch,

“Oh, uh. Really?” JJ squeaked. “I thought I took that one out of there...”

“Eww, JJ...”

“That is _depraved._ ”

“Gross!”

“This is worse than the time I caught Viktor and his husband in the hot tub--”

“Nasty.”

The whole study group looked at JJ a little bit differently after that. 

 

 

“Well class,” Professor Lee said, “that ties up our discussion on the quote ‘One daren’t laugh anymore’ and the futility of life. Please prepare a 500 word essay--en francais--examining the ‘suffering of being’ from an absurdist point of view for Thursday.” He looked down at his students, who grumbled predictably. Professor Lee assigned essays about vaguely depressing topics at least once a week. They were all running out of ideas.

Professor Lee, completely impervious to his students’ reactions to the assignment, walked back to the center of the classroom and cleared his throat. “As you know, Detroit Community College is committed to helping our students achieve excellence. Part of this means that all professors are required to offer their students an opportunity for extra credit.” He surveyed his students menacingly, with a hint of the smile that made Otabek half-certain that the man was deranged.

The professor continued his monologue. “Never in the eight years of my tenure at the college has any student ever accepted this option. Until now.” Professor Lee cleared his throat. “Jean-Jacques Leroy has chosen to throw an All Saint’s Day party on November first. While I attempted to explain to him that doing such a thing would be cultural appropriation, he informed me that he is, in fact, not regular Canadian but French Canadian.” Professor Lee looked at the class sternly. “Thus, I cannot prevent JJ from doing this without risking a discrimination lawsuit, which would totally cripple this community college’s ability to educate the community.”

Professor Lee paused for dramatic effect. “Considering this would be contrary to the very spirit of the American public school system, I have decided to  be faculty advisor for JJ’s party.” Although his words suggested otherwise, he did not look like a man who believed he was doing the right thing.

Unable to resist another opportunity to brag about his accomplishments, JJ stood up in his seat and announced, “Anyone who comes to the party will get extra credit too!” When the class stared at him without responding, he added quickly  “And also mulled wine! For all attendees 21 and over, of course. We will be checking IDs!”

Professor Lee made an expression of annoyance. “Yes, anyone who attends the party will indeed receive extra credit and two complimentary drink tickets. Which is good for you. I, however, won’t even be paid for this, due to unprecedented budget cuts to the American public school system following the inauguration of a Donald Trump....” He continued to rant about this in rapid French, with lots of guttural hacking sounds for emphasis.

Well. Far be it from Otabek to turn down free alcohol, especially if he could get extra credit for the privilege.... Perhaps there were a few upsides to attending community college as an adult. Certainly alcohol was one of them.

 

 

“You know, I’m really glad you don’t hit on me anymore,” Yuri told Otabek. They were walking across the Quad after the rest of their group went to class, just killing time before Yuri’s studio reservation. He had another twenty minutes to kill, and Otabek was more than willing to kill it with him.

“I have literally  _never_ hit on you,” Otabek insisted. His deadpan expression was ruined by the way his mouth kept twitching upward as if it wanted to smile.

“You’re a terrible liar,” Yuri told him. The wind had tangled Yuri’s blond hair in his scarf, and Yuri fidgeted, attempting to yank it free before he brushed the sun out of his green eyes to get a better look at Otabek’s face.

“That’s what you think,” Otabek grumbled, but he knew he didn’t mean it. They walked a few more paces.  

Yuri stretched. His belly was taut where it peaked between the bottom of his tiger-striped shirt and his skinny jeans, but Otabek did his best not to notice this. “Anyway,” Otabek continued, “are you going to JJ’s All Saint’s party Tuesday night?”

“Ffft,” Yuri scoffed. “Why would I spend more time with JJ than absolutely necessary? I have a perfect grade in French. I don’t need the extra credit.”

“I don’t know,” Otabek admitted. “Everyone else from the study group is coming. I thought maybe you liked us enough to want to hang out with us. It’s not a big deal if you... don’t.” Well. That was a lie. It  _was_ a big deal, but Otabek wasn’t going to let Yuri know that if he could help it.

Yuri stopped short, and Otabek almost tripped trying to avoid walking into him. He was still trying to regain his balance when he heard Yuri say something softly. “If you put it that way... I guess I could come.” He flashed Otabek a wistful smile. “I wouldn’t want all my friends to be having fun without me, you know?”

“All you ever talk is shit,” Otabek said. Judging by the way he smiled when he heard it, Otabek was certain Yuri understood the fondness with which Otabek insulted him.

 

 

“Did you get the results of your sex test from Professor Giacometti?” Yuri looked strangely eager to find out Otabek’s results. Well. Otabek had no intention of telling him.

“Of course I did.”

“So what did you get?”

Otabek raised an eyebrow, but his face was otherwise impassive. “Yuri, it’s not the kind of test where you get a letter grade.”

“I know!” he shouted. “Nevermind. I was just... Curious.”

Hmm. Yuri’s cheeks were a little bit pink, right? Otabek was sure it couldn’t be a trick of the light... if anything, the florescent lighting tended to make people look green instead of pink. “Curious, Yuri?”

“C’mon,” he said, biting his lower lip. “If you tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.”

Otabek was so shocked he nearly tripped over his own feet.

Yuri was kind enough to help him back up to his feet.

He unfolded his results with dramatic effect, then caught Yuri’s eye over the top of the paper. Yuri nodded. “OK” Otabek began, “I’m a bisexual demiromantic submissive. With a kink for getting cucked.”

“Really?” Yuri asked.

Otabek only glared. “You didn’t say anything about judging me.”

“You idiot. I’m always judging you.” Yuri’s mouth quirked into something between a smile and a sneer.

They left the building and crossed the quad, remaining silent until they were almost at the arts building. Otabek walked him to the top of the steps, then stood and looked at Yuri expectantly. “So?”

“So what?”

“So what did you get on your sex test? You promised,” Otabek reminded.

Yuri’s cheeks flared even pinker. He closed his eyes, as if he were unable to look Otabek in the eyes and answer properly. “Bigender gay dom with a penchant for group sex.”

“Huh,” Otabek said.

“Huh indeed.” Yuri’s eyelids fluttered open, and something electric arced between he and Otabek.

“Indeed,” Otabek repeated. Yuri’s green eyes were closer, and that static feeling was somehow--more--

“Hey guys!” The familiar voice interrupted the moment, and Yuri and Otabek jumped apart from each other.

Flustered, Otabek looked back toward the bus stop and saw Sara standing with the weird guy from the Spanish department she called her twin brother although they didn’t really look that related. The weirdo was standing next to Sara with his arms crossed over his chest, glaring a challenge at anyone who dared address his sister directly.

Otabek ignored him and waved her over. “Hey!”

The weird guy from the Spanish department tried to follow Sara, but she wagged her finger in a gesture that could only mean _stay_. The guy looked wounded, but he did turn back to the bus stop, though he did keep trying to sneak peeks at them.

“Sara,” Yuri muttered, barely even able to muster any sarcasm. The fact that Yuri didn’t yell at her for interrupting was Otabek’s first clue that he wasn’t quite himself.

“Hey, what did you guys get on Professor Giacometti’s sex test?”

He was about to answer when Yuri snarled, “That’s kind of a personal question, don’t you think?”

Otabek cocked his head. _Interesting_.

“Sorry! I was just curious,” Sara apologized.

“Pervert,” Yuri accused.

 _Huh_. Yuri hadn’t had a problem telling Otabek his results. He’d even... flirted? _I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours._

Sara took a deep breath. “Well, I’m a--”

“Shut up, hag! Keep that shit to yourself.” Only Yuri could manage to sound so attacked when he was the only one displaying any outward signs of aggression. “No one wants to know.” Funny how he’d been so eager to find out Otabek’s results just a few minutes earlier...

Otabek was all to glad to let Sara change the subject to the cisnormative assumptions that Professor Giacometti’s test had made. Her audacity distracted Yuri, which afforded Otabek the chance to contemplate the results of his and Yuri’s sex tests, and what those results might mean, in peace.  

 

 

Otabek’s birthday was a Monday just like any other Monday.

Well, perhaps that was not quite correct, Otabek admitted as he gazed around the atrium and found himself surrounded by a wizard, two Spidermen, and a small horde of zombies. His birthday was October 31st, or Halloween, as it was known in America, and most of the students were wearing their Halloween costumes already, even though it was not quite 9 in the morning.

Yuri plopped into the chair next to Otabek, wearing a purple crushed-velvet blazer, shiny faux-leather leggings, and a ridiculous pair of platform shoes. The shoes were the worst part: clunky, heavy things that clopped as Yuri walked. Otabek had the sudden, unwanted vision of Yuri stepping on him in those ridiculous shoes, and was curiously aroused...

“Hey, asshole, why are you staring at me like that?” Yuri griped. He helped himself to a bite of Otabek’s Nutella croissant.

“Nice costume,” Otabek said, taking a sip of his coffee. “I didn’t know you were into Prince. He’s one of my favorite musicians.”

“Please,” Yuri said. Otabek had to admit the eyeliner certainly helped to intensify the shade Yuri was throwing his way. “Prince was very important to my development as a young queer of fluid gender. We didn’t have many role models in Putin’s Russian, you know.” He grinned at Otabek a  bit mischievously. ”Also purple is a fierce color.”

“True.”

Yuri looked him up and down. “You’re not dressed up.”

“Oh, I don’t usually celebrate Halloween,” Otabek admitted.

“Don’t tell me you think Halloween is the Devil’s holiday. I’m only your friend because I thought you were into Satan just as much as I am, and I am so very, very into Satan.” Yuri batted his eyelashes, and Otabek noticed his lids were brushed with purple glitter. Otabek swallowed--he loved every inch of Yuri’s costume: the lacy shirt, the crushed velvet blazer, the ridiculous disco shoes that made Otabek’s dick throb with confusing desire...

Otabek swallowed. “Well, I celebrate a different holiday on Halloween.”

“Huh?” Yuri blinked. “There’s another holiday on Halloween?”

“Yeah. My birthday,” Otabek said. “I’m twenty-five today.”

“Ugh, you know what that means? You’re a _Scorpio_.” Yuri looked at him suspiciously.

“So what?” Otabek didn’t put much stock in that kind of mysticism.

“So I’m a _Pisces_.” Yuri looked indignant that Otabek didn’t understand his fairy-magic.

“And...? I don’t understand what you mean by that.”

Yuri huffed and opened his mouth to answer, but was interrupted by Mila and Minami. The two redheads were already in the midst of a serious caffeine and sugar bender, and they were carrying two plastic bags overflowing with Halloween candy.

“Happy Halloween!” Mila crowed. She was dressed in a faux leather skirt, wearing lots of primal jewelry and a mace. Otabek thought she might have been dressed as some warrior princess or something.

“Hey guys, you wanna eat a bunch of gummy bears, slam some Monster Energy drinks, and get crazy?” Minami asked, dumping his bag of treats onto the table. He was dressed up in a singlet made of Spandex and sequins that looked just like the one Tamaki wore in Tamaki on Ice, except he was wearing a pair of winter boots instead of ice skates on his feet.

“Did someone say energy drinks?” Even JJ was dressed up in a puffy red jacket with a blue beanie that made him look like a character from South Park. “I’ll take two, if you’re offering.”

Both Otabek and Yuri accepted Minami’s offer of an energy drink. Cracking the tab on his can, Yuri started talking about astrology again. “You know Otabek, Pisces and Scorpio are compatible, but they’re really _intense_ together. They’re both water signs, you know?”

Otabek had no idea what Yuri meant, but he agreed anyway.

Yuri kept talking about the stars. “Listen, as a Scorpio you’re really enigmatic, Beka--”

He almost choked on his drink when Yuri addressed him by the familiar nickname. However, Otabek’s train of thought was cut short when Sara entered the study room, shutting the door firmly before her brother Mickey could sneak his way in behind her.

“Who gives a crap about Scorpio? Please tell me you don’t believe in that shit,” Sara said. She was dressed in a tight red dress with light-up horns and high heels. Mila was trying (and failing) not to stare at the cutout placed suggestively over Sara’s cleavage. Well. Honestly. neither could Otabek.

Yuri huffed defensively. “Astrology can tell you a lot about a person!” he insisted.

“Yeah right,” Sarah said, laughing derisively. “Astrology is a pseudoscience. Psychology, on the other hand, can tell you a lot of useful information about a person.”

“I don't believe in psychology,” Yuri muttered.

“Well,” Sara said, “psychology is a science. It exists whether you believe in it or not.”

Yuri, who never accepted defeat gracefully, had no comeback. Mila gave Sara a high-five, clearly approving of her rhetoric.

As Yuri sat and sputtered in the corner, Viktor breezed into the room, slightly flustered and out of breath. “Sorry I’m late, guys,” he huffed. “I forgot today was Monday.”

Mila clucked her tongue. “Viktor, it’s frightening that you’re a 34-year-old man responsible for two young children.”

Viktor clasped his hands to his chest and mimed swooning. “I know. I just got so excited for the kids’ costumes. They’re going as Lilo and Stitch this year..."

Mila, Sara, and Minami all made cute squealing noises at the photograph of the kids in their costumes. Viktor just made that stupid swooning expression again. “I’d be lost without my darling husband. He’s the one who reminded me today was Monday...”

“Shut up, old man. You and your piggy husband are codependent losers!” Yuri spat.

The gang laughed at him so loudly that Lead Librarian Lilia Baranovskaya kicked them out ten minutes before the end of their scheduled hour in retaliation.

 

 

Yuri didn’t say anything more about Otabek’s birthday, but he did confront him in the parking lot later that afternoon.

“Hey,” he said, shivering a little bit in his ridiculous purple jacket.

“Hey,” Otabek said. He unravelled his thick wooly scarf from around his own neck, and handed it to Yuri, who accepted it gratefully. The sun had already gone down and it was starting to get cold. Winter came to Detroit early and it looked like this year would be no exception; Otabek zipped up his leather jacket, careful to secure the buckle on the collar against his throat.

He blew on his fingers before pulling on his gloves and asked Yuri, “What are you doing here so late? Don’t you get out of class at two on Mondays?”

Yuri sidled up between Otabek and his motorcycle and changed the subject. “You never told me Halloween was your birthday.”

Otabek shrugged his helmet onto his head. “I don’t make a big deal about it.”

“Well that’s stupid,” Yuri said. His pearly pink lipstick was a little bit smeared at the top of his Cupid's bow. It made Otabek think of forbidden things. “Birthdays are a whole day that’s all about you. What’s not to like about that?”

“Of course a brat like you would want that.” Otabek’s voice was monotone but he gazed at Yuri fondly.

Yuri pushed his bangs back with a gloved hand. Surprisingly, he didn’t acknowledge Otabek’s nickname. “Anyway, you should have told me.” He straddled Otabek’s bike where it was parked; Yuri hasn’t bothered to ask and the way he helped himself to a seat on the back of Otabek’s bike without waiting for permission said _everything._

“Why’s that?” Otabek barely recognized his own voice, raspy and raw in the back of his throat.

“Because I would have been able to get you a gift,” Yuri said.

“Ah. Yuri. You don’t have to.”

“But I do.” Yuri insisted, leaning toward his friend. His thighs squeezed the saddle of Otabek’s bike in his tight jeans, and it made Otabek have to close his eyes lest he do something he regret.

When he opened his eyes again, Yuri’s eyes were all pupil, like a cat hunting in the darkness, but what Otabek noticed most was the intensity of the slim green ring surrounding them.

“What?” Yuri quirked his head in a question, bringing their faces even closer.

There was too much spit in Otabek’s mouth all at once, and he swallowed before asking: “Yuri. What would you have gotten me for my birthday? If you’d known?”

Yuri shook his blonde head. “I don’t know,” he admitted, and Otabek allowed himself to be disappointed for a moment, but then Yuri kept talking. “I’d want some time to get you something really good. The kind of thing you’d want more than anything else.” His green gaze sharpened meaningfully as he spoke, and Otabek’s mouth was suddenly full of spit, his cheeks hot.

Otabek swallowed another mouthful of spit--and before he realized what was happening, Yuri’s tongue stole into his mouth. He gasped, opening his mouth a little wider, and Yuri took the opportunity to slip the tip of his tongue between Otabek’s parted lips.

Seated on the bike, Yuri was a couple of inches taller than Otabek. Their difference in height like this was thrilling--though he was slim and small, it did not stop Yuri from leading the kiss--the boy was as bossy as ever, even when he was kissing.

His tongue dipped behind Otabek’s teeth to stroke against the roof of his mouth. Otabek let out a soft surprised sound that Yuri swallowed. A fingertip teased the hinge of his jaw, the pressure pushing his mouth open wider as Yuri _devoured._ Otabek had never felt so thoroughly taken apart from a kiss--struck still, unable to move as Yuri’s tongue twined against his own.

The hand sneaking into the back pocket of his jeans to cup the cheek of his ass took him by surprise, and he gasped, breaking the kiss to lean his head against Yuri’s narrow shoulder and take a few slow deep breaths.The purple velvet of his blazer was hot and soft against Otabek’s forehead, and he felt Yuri’s chest rise and fall in a chuckle a split second before the hand in his pocket grabbed the cheek of his ass and _squeezed._

“Take me home, birthday boy,” Yuri breathed against Otabek’s scalp. His frosted pink lipgloss was tacky and smeared all over his chin and cheeks, a pleasant contrast to the cute smudge he’d had on his Cupid’s bow before their hungry kisses. “I can’t tell you what you do to me, but my body will never be the same.”

Otabek climbed onto the bike, then arranged Yuri’s hands comfortably around his midsection as he made himself comfortable in the saddle. However, before Otabek engaged the motor, he turned to look over his shoulder and asked, “Yuri?”

Yuri hummed contentedly against Otabek’s leather-clad back.

“Was that a Prince reference?”

The purple-clad man neither confirmed nor denied the accusation. “Don’t worry about that. You just leave it all up to me. We’ll have a good time,” Yuri simply said with a cheeky smirk. He stuck his hands just below Otabek’s waistband, and Otabek shivered, half from the cold, and half from imagining all the ways he was going to let this impertinent and impossible man wreck him utterly.

 

 

“Soooo.... You guys look like shit.”

“Thank you for noticing, JJ.” Otabek took another desperate sip of water and chased it with blue Gatorade. He winced--it tasted like sweat and food coloring, and made him feel _more_ like throwing up, not less.

He and Yuri had spent the night together in a desperate haze of sex and tequila. They’d finally managed to exhaust each other by the time the sun rose, sleeping through Otabek’s alarm and nearly missing French class, finally stumbling in fifteen minutes late wearing the same clothes they’d worn the day before.

“Why are you still wearing your Prince jacket?” Mila asked, putting Yuri’s greasy blonde hair into a quick braid as they gulped down coffee around a table in the atrium before French class the next morning. “Wasn’t Halloween yesterday?”

“This blazer has nothing to do with Halloween, I just really, really like Prince. Can you stop asking stupid questions now, Mila?” Yuri growled.

Mila scrunched her nose and  turned to rummage around in her purse. She handed him the bottle of her perfume and explicit directions to apply it to his armpits, ass, and hair.

“No. I am not going to smell like flowers and fruitcake all day,” Yuri insisted.

“Yuri, oh my God, I am going to tell you this exactly once,” Mila said, emphasizing each word with exaggerated diction. “You smell like a whorehouse had sex with a distillery and then showered in a fountain of flavored lube. You obviously stayed out all night taking part in some depraved sex orgy and neither showered nor changed before coming to class. So, for the love of everything decent in this world, please use the perfume.”

Yuri glared, then swatted the vial out of Mila’s well-manicured hand into his own as he stormed off. Otabek had to admit that he certainly smelled much sweeter when he returned from the bathroom.

It was going to be a long time until JJ’s All Saint’s Day party was finally over, but Otabek was already looking forward to dragging Yuri home with him again for another night. He was already having trouble concentrating on Samuel Beckett’s commentary on absurdity when Yuri smelled like this: sugared lemon on the surface with Otabek’s sex lingering beneath his skin.

Hidden underneath the table, Yuri’s possessive hand on Otabek’s thigh did not help matters either. Otabek had never been so appreciative of his natural resting poker face.

Minami was the one who finally broke the silent tension. “Um--so, I’m really confused about Pozzo....”

“He is very confusing,” Viktor agreed.

Yuri rolled his eyes. To Viktor, he said, “Everything confuses you because you’re an idiot.” Then he turned to Minami and asked, “What’s so confusing about him?”

Otabek had to chuckle--of course Yuri never turned down an opportunity to show off his rather formidable mastery of the French language.

Minami squinted. “You know the part when Pozzo asks Vladimir and Estragon, ‘I used to have wonderful sight--but are you friends?’ And then Estragon laughs and says, ‘He wants to know if we are _his_  friends’?” His poorly pronounced dialogue rose in high-pitched question.

Yuri interrupted snidely. “Pozzo’s a fool. Once you understand that, he’s pretty easy to understand.”

Otabek cleared his throat. “Yeah, but then Vladimir tells him that Pozzo wants to know if they are _Pozzo’s_ friends, and says ‘we’ve proved we are, by helping him’.” He nudged Yuri’s side, whose hand on Otabek’s thigh clenched in warning.

“Awww, Yurio,” Mila teased, launching herself across the table to engulf Yuri in a monstrous hug. “You’ve helped us so much. I guess we’re your friends now.”

“Ewww. Get off of me, you gross hag. I don’t want to be friends with you,” Yuri said as he attempted to wriggle free of Mila’s grasp. He was unsuccessful, mostly because Mila had the strength of a bull but also because Sara had decided to use the opportunity to grasp Mila, therefore blocking any means of escape.

Viktor embraced a protesting Yuri as soon as he managed to free himself from Mila and Sara. “Yurio, you were always _my_ friend,” he pouted, drawing the protesting man close.

“Oh, are we hugging now?” Minami asked, curious. “Are we the hugging kind of friends?”

In answer, JJ slung a long arm around Minami’s shoulder before clasping a hand on Yuri’s shoulder in a manly gesture of friendship. “You know, this isn’t so bad.... Right, Yuri?”

“No one here is my friend! I hate every last one of you!” Yuri cried.

But it was too late. The rest of the study group engulfed him in a crushing group hug, the combined mass of which pressed Otabek and Yuri together at its center.

“Get them off of me,” Yuri hissed at Otabek, his green eyes narrowed, incisors flashing menacingly.

And Otabek could only grin, and laugh, and pull his friend closer.


	2. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this is one of the first scenes that i wrote for this 'verse, when i had a vague idea of what i wanted to happen in this fic but no idea how to do it. since the rest of the fic is in Otabek's POV, i decided to include it as an epilogue-of-sorts that ties up the rest of the story. it's based on the cinco de mayo episode of "community", which is a brilliant piece of comedy.

Well. JJ’s All Saint’s Day party was considerably more morbid that Otabek had expected. Halloween was yesterday, but JJ had chosen to decorate the classroom intricately decorated cardboard gravestones. Each gravestone had a pillar candle with a saint balanced on top, and JJ seemed quite proud of himself for having been able to celebrate the holiday with such authenticity so far away from home.

“JJ, why do you have a cemetery set up in here? And why are all the headstones marked with variations on the name ‘Leroy’?” Sarah asked, sounding legitimately concerned for her friend.

“Well, the most important All Saint’s Day tradition is to honor your dead. And since my family is all buried in Canada, and it’s actually really complicated to ship someone’s mortal remains over the border, I improvised,” JJ said, shoving a handful of chip and dip into his mouth. “You like it? I used real Canadian moss and lichen.”

“JJ, I’m a little concerned with your fixation on death...” Sara flipped open her little yellow notebook. “When did this obsession with the afterlife begin?”

“Well, every year on All Saints Day, my parents and I go to the family mausoleum--”

“Oh my God you wench, just shut up!” Yurio interrupted, enraged. “Leroy is not suffering from a mental disorder. This is an All Saint’s Day party. The whole holiday is about death!” 

“I’m gonna have to agree with Sara on this,” Mila said. “There are like ten tombstones at this party. And he’s having us all recite prayers to our dead ancestors. JJ is my friend, I’m just concerned for his mental health.”

“Uh, guys? I have a little something I like to call  _ religion _ ,” JJ said, crossing himself. “The most important part of All Saint’s Day is saying prayers for your deceased ancestors and all the saints, you know.” 

“Are you aware of the fact that religion is nothing more than a collective delusion that was passed down as law and enforced by a culture of endless war and exploitation of the working class?” Mila asked him.

“Now, Mila, it’s perfectly normal to have religious faith,” Sara soothed. “Not everything has to be political, you know?”

“How is religion not political?” It was exactly the wrong thing to say. Mila immediately launched into a lecture about the intersectionality of economic oppression and racial and religious hatred under a capitalist regime. It took several minutes for anyone work up the nerve to interrupt her, and no one way surprised when Yuri was the one who eventually broke.

“Are you listening to yourself?” The short man was so worked up he spat a little bit as he spoke. Otabek probably should have been disgusted when he got some of Yuri’s spit on his shirt from a particularly emphatic statement, but he could only bring himself to chuckle softly

“Why are you so angry all the time, Yuri?” Sarah asked, looking genuinely concerned as she turned to a blank page in her notebook.

“Ugh. I see you taking notes, you Italian bitch,” he spat. “You literally took one semester of psychology. Stop psychoanalyzing your friends.”

Sarah pouted. If she continued to psychoanalyze her fellow partygoers, she did so discreetly, jotting things down in her ubiquitous yellow notebook.

 

 

Mila was trying not to listen to the prayers coming from the graves annoy her too much. It was difficult, since pretty much any mention of patriarchal religion inspired and immediate stress response, but Mila breathed deep and did her best.

Sara had volunteered to get Mila another drink, which would certainly help calm her down. Mila just had to distract herself until Sara made it back with the alcohol.

Huh. Something interesting was happening over at the snacks. Yuri and Otabek were smiling at each other over the vegetable platter. 

Mila knit her brow. Was Yuri actually enjoying the company of another human?  _ Weird _ . Yuri shook his head, but let Otabek feed him the carrot, and Mila leaned in to look a little closer, but her observation was soon interrupted by a tap on her elbow: Sara was standing next to her, holding two glasses of punch, one of which Mila accepted with a grateful smile.

“Hey, do you see way that Otabek is standing next to Yuri?” Sarah said. Her arm was slung around Mila’s waist as they leaned back against the counter.

Mila took a sip of her mulled wine. “Yeah, you mean like, with his feet?”

Sara shook her head. “No, silly. Look.” She placed her hands on Mila’s hips and angled them so they were adjacent to hers, though there was still a respectable amount of space between them. “See how his hips line up with Yuri’s? Like, if he took two steps forward, their dongs would touch.” She demonstrated, nudging Mila’s hip with her own.

Mila threw her head back and laughed, which had the effect of brushing her shoulder back against Sara’s breast. Sara shivered, which made her breath come out in a long sigh against Mila’s shoulder. She leaned in, suddenly confident of her next action. “I bet they’re banging.”

“No way. Yuri hates everyone too much to bang  _ anybody _ ,” Mila protested. She made a sound that might have been a laugh, but then Sara leans in. 

“Fifty bucks says they’re banging.”

“I’m an immigrant, Sara. I don’t have that kind of money,” Mila complained.

“Fine then--a date.” Sara pursed her lower lip. “If I win, I take you out on a date. If  _ you _ win,  _ you _ take  _ me _ on a date.”

Mila tapped Sara’s pout with her thumb. “Well. I’d be stupid not to take those odds.” She was about to lean in and replace her thumb with her lips when Mickey grabbed Sara and dragged her to the mock cemetery. Her brother kept complaining that he wanted to honor his ancestors like a good Catholic boy, but but there was a deranged hippie that kept trying to talk dirty to him, and Mickey insisted that he needed his sister to come along and protect him. 

She sighed.  _ You’ll be mine soon enough, Sara _ , Mila hoped furiously. If she had to wait too much longer, she might lose her mind as well as her ability to orgasm.

 

 

Minami had been talking about Tamaki on Ice! with a shaggy-looking man for nearly an hour, yet his rapid-fire commentary showed no sign of slowing. “So you know the part of Tamaki on Ice when he almost falls during the quad flip, but he gets enough rotations? And then his coach kisses him on international television for being brave enough to take a chance? That’s the best moment from the first season, isn’t it?” 

The bearded man across from Minami suddenly sas up a little straighter in his seat before changing the subject completely. “So, uh... my name is Emil. And your name is...?” the scruffy guy asked Minami, offering his hand with exaggerated diction and deliberateness.

“Oh. Uh, Kenjirou,” Minami said, grasping the man’s proffered hand in a vigorous shake. 

Emil looked him directly in the eye. Their fingers were still joined in a handshake, and he squeezed. “Kenjirou, I feel like I should be honest with you. I’m not interested in Tamaki on Ice. What I am interested in is having gay sex with you.”

Minami looked down at their hands and sits perfectly still. “No thank you.”

Emil withdrew his hand, utterly incredulous. “OK, dude, you’ve been sitting here--” he checked his watch, “for forty minutes at this party, and never picked up on the fact that I was hitting on you the whole time?”

“Actually, I did notice after awhile,” Minami admitted. Emil raised his eyebrows, but Minami just kept looking at him with his disarmingly neutral expression. “I just really, really like talking about Tamaki on Ice!” 

Emil stood up, shook his head, and stalked back over to the snacks. “You know, Yawamushi Pedal is much better than Tamaki on Ice,” he called sarcastically over his back.

Minami wished one of his other friends were here right now. He just felt weird, too weird to be seen. He just needed to be somewhere where no one would look at him for a while...

 

 

Sara sighed, and checked her watch. It had been five minutes since the line for the women’s bathroom. Mickey was sure to come looking for her if she didn’t hurry up...

There didn’t seem to be anyone in line for the men’s room... Hmm. Sara ignored the judgment of the gender-conforming types in line for the women’s room, and ducked into the men’s bathroom.

Luckily, no one was standing at the urinal. The stall seemed to be cracked open, and Sara pushed it open--

Surprisingly, Minami was sitting on top of the toilet tank, sniffling softly into his hands.

“Hey Kenji, are you OK?” Sara asked, gathering her friend up in a hug.

“I’m not OK, Sara. I’m too strange to be OK,” Minami sobbed. “There was this guy? We were talking about Tamaki on Ice, you know? And it turns out he was hitting on me but I thought we were just having a nice conversation. And then the guy got all mad, and now I feel like shit.” Minami swiped his runny nose with the back of his hand. “I’m just too weird.” Minami snuffled again and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“I mean, you  _ are _ weird,” Sara said. 

Minami took a deep breath, then buried his face in her shoulder. After a while, his tears began to soak through Sara’s shirt, but she just patted him patiently. Though she kept her left arm around Minami, but she did sneak a pen into her right hand long enough to jot down a few quick notes in her little yellow notebook.

Suddenly, Minami stopped sniffling.

“You know, Sara, it’s not nice to use your friends as test subjects for your mind experiments,” Minami said.

Sara tucked her notebook into her pocket, then held out her hand in a gesture of apology.

“I’m sorry Kenji.” 

“It’s OK, Sara. We can still be friends.” Minami offered his hand to Sara, and she grasped it in a firm shake, then used that shake to draw him into a hug. It took a few seconds, but eventually Minami was able to relax, and he discovered that a long comforting hug from a good friend could be a very pleasant thing indeed.

Well. At least up until the point said good friend’s strangely possessive twin brother barged into the bathroom stall, accusing you of compromising his sister’s virtue while he kicked you in the shin until you stopped hugging her, Minami thought, rubbing his ankle tenderly and heading back to the All Saint’s Day party.  

 

 

“Hey guys, I’m so sorry I’m late! I totally forgot tonight was the party!” Viktor called as he breezed in, flanked by two shorter men in fine clothing. He threw his arm around the waist of the one with the glasses and the messy hair, who, Otabek had to admit, looked curiously familiar.

Minami’s jaw dropped open. “Oh. My. God. Oh. My. God.”

Viktor guided the men over to greet his group of friends. As they approached, Minami turned louder and redder.

“But my Yuuri wouldn’t let me miss something as important as JJ’s party!” Viktor nuzzled the man on his arm on his neck one last time for good measure, then straightened and introduced his companion to his classmates. “Everyone, this is my husband, Yuuri Ka--”

Minami launched himself in front of Viktor’s husband. “Yuuri Katsuki! Tamaki from Tamaki on Ice! The man who can skate and dance and act all at the same time! Oh my God, I love Tamaki on Ice. It is my favorite thing. You’re my favorite actor. Can you sign some stuff for me sometime? I have a whole bunch of merch--”

“Kenji, shut up! You’re scaring him!” Yuri scoffed. 

“Oh, uh. It’s OK. I don’t mind,” Viktor’s Yuuri said, offering Minami his hand in a friendly shake. He gestured to the man with the cute smile and unfortunate blunt bangs at his right. “You’re a fan of the show, so I’m sure you’re familiar with Phichit Chulanot...”

“Oh. My. God,” Minami repeated. Phichit played Tamaki’s coach Charong, who had fallen in love with Tamaki during a drunken dance battle before deciding to quit his own career to coach the struggling skater. So far, this was turning out to be the best night of Minami’s entire life. 

Evidently, the rest of the French class thought so too. Soon Viktor, his husband, their famous friend, and their biggest fanboy Minami, were swarmed by a crowd of starstruck students. 

“Ugh, look at all of them, fawning over that piggy,” Yuri huffed in Otabek’s ear derisively. “Don’t they have any  _ dignity _ ?”

Otabek knew that Yuri was probably pissed off, but the soft puff of his voice in Otabek’s ear was having another effect on him entirely. Otabek tried to chuckle, but it became a groan when Yuri nibbled gently at the lobe of his ear.

Yuri smirked, and Otabek grabbed him in a hug, then smacked a playful kiss on Yuri’s lips.

“Hey! Hey, I saw that, you know!” a smooth voice said.

Shit. Was that... Sara? Otabek released Yuri when he recognized her accusing violet stare, but it was already too late.

“What are you talking about, wench?” Yuri accused.

“You’re banging Otabek! Don’t try to hide it! I saw you kiss him!” Sara insisted.

“It’s true, you know. I saw it too,” JJ said.

“Oooh, Yuri, you’ve grown so much,” Viktor gushed. “Yuuri, darling, our Yurio has a boyfriend now!”

Viktor’s Yuuri fumbled with his glasses. “Is that so? Congratulations, Yuri, Otabek,” Yuuri said, and his friend Phichit nodded his agreement.

Minami was distracted from his slack-jawed admiration of his hero. “Why are we congratulating Yuri and Otabek? Does it have anything to do about the unresolved sexual tension thing they’ve been doing for a while? Because it’s starting to get a bit uncomfortable for everyone to be around you two--”

“Oh, shut up,” Yuri bitched. “In an instant, everything will vanish and every single one of you jerks will be alone once more in the midst of nothingness, so help me God.”

“Isn’t that a quote from  _ Godot?” _ JJ asked, scratching his undercut.

“Huh,” Mila said, turning away from JJ as she faced Sara. “You were right about Yuri and Otabek.” She cradled Sara’s hand in hers, ignoring the glare that Mickey gave her. “I guess I owe you a date, then.”

Sara squeezed Mila’s fingers a little bit more tightly, her violet eyes crinkling when Mila blushed as red as her hair. “I’m free tomorrow after seven.”

“There’s this vegan ice cream place I’ve been wanting to check out...”

“Yes,” Sara said, so happy she ignored her brother’s attempts get her attention completely. “Yes.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> the muse has a praise kink and gets off on all your kudos and comments! thanks so much for reading this long, weird-ass sitcom-in-fic-form. hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> if you liked this, i also have a mashup between "yuri! on ice" and "it's always sunny in philadelphia" called ["The Skate Gang Produces and Ice Show"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10394475/chapters/22953264). it's a WIP but who knows, you just might like it.


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